2018 Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize: The University of Adelaide

Adelaide Airport Cultural District by Junxiang Chen
Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize
Master of Landscape Architecture, The University of Adelaide

A section model showing proposed events and activities in the “Theatre Village” section of the site.

Image: Junxiang Chen

Project statement

In light of increasing globalization and issues relating to the integration of different cultures, the question of how we might unlock the potential of local identity and localize international culture has become urgent. Here, the Adelaide Airport area, as the gateway to the city, is transformed from a massive collection of sporadic spaces into an integrated proposal that is both spontaneous and planned, vivid and logical, creative and inherited, extensive but correlative, Australian but international, and visionary yet practical. To avoid the shock of imposing overwhelming change, “place identity” has been employed as the main strategy for the redevelopment of the Adelaide Airport Cultural District, which every inhabitant of Adelaide is familiar with.

This project advocates the significance of place identity in urban regeneration and aims to provide development options for the Adelaide Airport area. Firstly, the project discusses the importance of place identity in airport area regeneration through an analysis of public desires. Secondly, the proposal gives weight to different identities and allows for the existence of hybridized forms of identities, both traditional and modern, based on site analysis. Thirdly, the project aims to transfer and adapt multiple identities into the site through different design tactics. Fourthly, a number of possible projects are finalized through macro-scale plans and the integration of different landscape design inspirations. In the final stage, a more in-depth site analysis will be conducted as the basis for further detail design.

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2018 Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize: The University of Adelaide

2018 Landscape Architecture Australia Student Prize: The University of Adelaide

A section model showing proposed events and activities in the “Theatre Village” section of the site.

Image: Junxiang Chen

A diagram showing how the landscape design ideations have been translated and localized on the AACD site.

Image: Junxiang Chen

A master plan of Theatre Village. To give the land definition and a sense of destination, an interconnected and vivid area, touching all the edges of site, would break the monotony. Each side of the site would retain its own identity. The sunken playground in the centre would become a meeting point of the entire space.